March 19, 2017

Homeland

By JUDITH WARNER

This episode is a tough one.

On the one hand, there are some welcome developments: Quinn is back doing spy craft again: walking better, running in a reasonable sort of a way, outsmarting local law enforcement, creating a diversion, securing a private arsenal, breaking into Dar’s house (Pardon the recurrent obsession, but is it really Dar’s house? The whole house?), and conducting impromptu telephone surveillance. Those are good things.

The devolution of Dar into a quasi-lovesick nut job was well done, too.

But the moments of fun and interesting intrigue alternated with so much bad writing and weird acting that it was easy to lose sight of them.

There was, for example, Elizabeth Keane’s squirm-inducing coffee play, a ridiculous attempt at charm that felt just as jarring and wrong as her spoon-licking, coffee-witholding tough girl act back in Episode 1.

There were lines like “Get a load of this!” or “Whoever reported shots out here, they weren’t kiddin’!” from the hapless sheriff’s deputies who came to check out Quinn’s lake house. (Has anyone ever talked like that, in any of our lifetimes?)

There was Saul’s “gift from a doomed man.”

The president-elect’s brawny decision to go after Dar: “How do we shut him down?”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but by the time that Majiv Javadi got “rendered” to the Israelis, I felt less like I was watching “Homeland” than stuck in a new Steven Seagal film. A 2017 political thriller — “Hard to Stomach,” perhaps — where everyone has gone stupid, the solicitor general has Eric Trump hair, and Quinn is running around with a smear of Astrid’s blood on his face in order to show us — à la Seagal with his crazy eyebrows — that he’s Very, Very Mad.

Everyone is stating the obvious. “I should never have trusted you!” shouts Javadi, the foiled villain, who just seconds earlier, in a world that resembled “Homeland,” had been stirring his yogurt in the cleverest of ways.

Carrie is acting like an idiot — spilling career-destroying, C.I.A.-wrecking secrets and thinking it’s O.K. because they were “never supposed to be used.”

The president-elect is engaging in clichéd behavior like visibly bristling when she learns that Mossad felt she needed “to be educated.” And the blowhard Brett O’Keefe is not only masterminding a humongous fake news organization, but somehow understanding the technicalities of what his employees do, and exhibiting enough technical knowledge to judge the quality of their résumés.

I usually don’t have trouble suspending disbelief to allow the fantasy world of “Homeland” to unfurl. But I hate over-obvious cringe-worthy moments — “Let’s hope the service here is better” — from characters who ought to be smart enough to do better.

I thought that a great exception to the sometime idiocy of this episode was provided by Claire Danes. In the opening minutes of Carrie’s interview with a mental health expert that would allow a much-desired (supervised) visit with Franny, the actress gave us a more sustained dose of the inner Carrie than, I think, we’ve ever seen before. Carrie’s awkward, halting and seemingly honest self-portrayal as a lost child turned mother looked like a screen test — and it was a great performance.

“We had a relationship that was unusually … intense,” she said of her affair with Brody. “It didn’t end well.” And of Quinn: “I have a very intense relationship with him, too.”

The words, like Carrie’s self-awareness, are as insufficient as they are true. “I brought him into our house because I can’t go through that again. I can’t. Lose another one,” she says, ostensibly about Quinn.

“I don’t see how you could possibly understand,” she chides her interviewer, who seems, in fact, to understand all too well.

“I want you to listen and really try to hear,” he says. Four-year-olds “need, at times, to come first.”

I left that exchange really wondering, for the first time, if Carrie could indeed be permanently reunited with Franny. And all the more convinced that, if she is, it will spell the end of our series.

But let’s move on.

However clumsily, this episode provided a lot of plot exposition. Here’s what we have newly learned:

That Dar Adal is deranged. Unlike the grossly fake, clueless old man “Ooh,” he emitted early on at Elizabeth Keane’s seeming revelation about Majiv Javadi, his sharp intake of breath at the sight of Quinn’s bullet wound seemed genuine. And genuinely insane.

I was swayed by the lines he fed Peter: “If you won’t say what’s bothering you, how am I supposed to help? … I raised you, Peter. You are my child. More than that. I would never hurt you, Peter, never. I love you. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

Seeing the words in print, however, makes me wonder if I was emotionally bamboozled. As the young Quinn must himself have been. Over and over again.

That, behind Dar, there are indeed much greater powers at play. There are those vying for the position of Secretary of State. (Though they themselves may be little more than sock puppets.) There are those with “other opinions” regarding Peter Quinn’s safety. I do think that Dar wanted to save him. Just contrast his angry “I told you to leave him alone” to Watch Cap Man with the audible camp of his “I said, ‘Leave him alone! He’s got important work to do!’” when talking to Javadi.

That something bad is going to happen to someone who parks in the wrong place at O’Keefe’s fake news operation. That excess verbiage about the parking rules just screams of Chekhov’s gun. Ditto the attention to the senseless wall-markings:

“What’s O.P.C.?”

“No one seems to know.”

That Carrie is about to learn, over the remaining course of this season, that Not Everything Is About Her. Max — dead or alive — seems fated to deliver the message. Tonight, when she tried (halfheartedly) to talk him out of going to the “black box” of weirdo ops in Northern Virginia, because she didn’t want any longer to “put people in harm’s way without thinking twice,” he replied, “It’s not on you, it’s on me.” Which, of course, was true of Brody as well. And of Quinn. And of Conlin. And, arguably, of poor Fara.